Public Speakers, Lend Me Your Ears

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Public speakers, lend me your ears: You need to get a chat bot. Okay, let me just break it down for you. I had the most wonderful experience this past weekend. It was the second conference in a row where I, during my talk, gave everyone a link from stage so that they could see an example of a Messenger bot, and IT WAS AMAZING. I started conversations, created alliances, and got a couple of client signups out of it. That spells sweet victory to me!

Getting a speaking engagement is hard work, and engaging the audience once you’re there is even harder. The biggest frustration is that you won't necessarily get to interact with the people in the audience on an individual level. Well, darlings, a chatbot will make that hard won engagement happen. You can use that bot to draw people in. You can use it to deliver a freebie (pdf, presentation, etc) and draw people further into your world. Once you do this, you'll never go back.

i’ll never go back

One thing is certain: I will never go back to just saying, “Okay, thanks everybody. I'm over at the table over there if you want to talk”. No, I'm always going to be giving out a link from now on because I can use it to welcome people into my circle. I can have conversations with them, I can engage them further beyond just that one speech. It was an incredible experience.

but rj, my topic isn't chatbots

Now you may be thinking to yourself. Why would I want people to experience an interactive chatbot while I'm speaking? I understand. Listen, your topic doesn't have to be techie at all for you to benefit from this particular method. You can give away your genius in so many ways and in fact darlings, you're already doing it. You already have that magic pdf that people can download if they just give you the email address. You already have some sort of resource that you can give away to people for free that demonstrates your genius. You don't have to look very far to find this stuff. You can give them the powerpoint that you're presenting from onstage. That frees them up from having to take notes during the experience.

but rj, I don't want people to get distracted during my talk

I understand this too. There's a lot of prep that goes into these things. There's a lot of money, time, blood, sweat and tears and I get it. You don't want to say, hey, everybody, pull out your phone and then have half the people be distracted while your talk is going on.

But here's the truth. One thing that I don't expect in the year 2018 is that every single person that I'm looking at in the audience is going to be mesmerized by just one thing. Listen, I'm an entertaining speaker. I really am. I love getting up there on stage. I was born with a scent of ham in the air. Okay? But even though I know I'm entertaining, I know that there are people who would rather play with something and experience something than listen to me drone on all day.

Think of it like this. People are so used to pulling out their phones and doing things while people are speaking on stage. You're not really decreasing the amount of people that are paying attention to you. When you ask people to pull out their phones and download that freebie, you're actually increasing the amount of people paying attention to you.

Psst! Want to ask me about bots? Click this link, get on my calendar, and let's get the conversation started!